Our tip comes from Fran Pryor of Lower Macungie Township. She soaks her dentures in Polident every night, and she recently realized that the denture water she pours down the drain has some unused cleaning powder. Her brainchild will revolutionize the way we think about denture-soaking.

"I was dumping the stuff down the drain and I thought, why am I doing this?" Fran said. "I thought if it takes stains off my dentures, it should take stains out of the toilet. Just pour it into your toilet bowl, after removing dentures, of course. If it will clean your dentures in three minutes, think of what it can do for your toilet bowl."

She's really onto something here. Dentures often are made of porcelain, just like your toilet bowl. So now you can look forward to both losing your teeth and cleaning your hopper.

"It was a passing thought," Fran said. "I just started doing it a couple of weeks ago. The stuff is not really cheap, so I might as well get another shot out of it. It's not like you never have to clean your toilet again, but it helps it along in between. Since I started doing this my toilet bowls remain sparkling clean and I don't have to struggle with that messy bowl brush so often."

Fran said she finds Polident works better than store-brand denture cleaner.

We asked Polident-maker Glaxo SmithKline to find out what they thought about Fran's brilliant idea. We figured they might want to rush some lawyers out to patent the denture water and send some publicists to launch a new marketing campaign.

"We can't endorse that at all, it's not the intended use of the product," said Malesia Dunn, a spokeswoman for the company. "But we have heard from some customers who do that."

We were expecting a little more excitement.

Fran stars in a demonstration video you can see at http://www.mcall.com/onthecheap. She'll show you how to dump denture water into the bowl, and you'll be impressed by the sparkling shine of her toilet. Just don't tell the Ty-D-Bol man. We don't want him to get depressed.

We did some number-crunching in the On The Cheap lab and figure you'd save $880 over 20 years if you use Fran's tip instead of toilet cleansers that are inserted in the tank.

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